


Sinner

by deathwave1



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Homophobic language tw, Pre-Series, character introspection, coming to terms with sexuality, honestly more of a character study than anything, i couldn't resist it, the image of baby gay carm in the middle ages was too good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 00:13:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8918995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwave1/pseuds/deathwave1
Summary: The first time Carmilla wants to kiss a girl, she's twelve.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so fascinated by Carmilla's backstory and how little we know about it. I just finished a book about Stonewall and I had to write something. I just had this image of Carmilla as this scared little girl in 16-whatever, not understanding what's happening to her, so I took it and ran with it. Homophobic language trigger warning.

The first time Carmilla wants to kiss a girl, she's twelve.

Her name is Mircalla. She’s a countess, from a mid-ranking noble family, in Styria. She has a handmaiden, a girl only a few years older than herself, all flawlessly braided hair (so blond it’s almost white) and eyes so blue that they’re almost translucent, sparkling and dancing in the sunlight. The girl’s name is Sanna, and Mircalla cannot seem to get the older girl out of her head.

The hardest part isn’t the feelings, she thinks. No, she actually rather enjoys the odd, fuzzy feeling in her stomach that seems to only appear when Sanna is around. The most difficult part of the entire experience is that she simply doesn’t know what it means. As far as she knows, girls kiss boys. She isn’t far enough in her Bible studies yet to understand that what she is feeling, her childish crush on a pretty, older girl, makes her a sinner.

So she makes a decision that she will only understand the truly folly of years later. Despite his long track record of being neglectful at his best, she decides to go to her father. She thinks maybe, just maybe, this time will be different. This time he will pull her up into his lap and smile and tell her something wise and fatherly and everything will finally be as it should be; everything will be _right_.

She's wrong.

The moment the beginning of her mumbled, stuttering explanation leaves her mouth, his face darkens. Mircalla has seen her father angry before. She has seen him in the deepest pits of drunken rage, when he stalks the corridors of their small castle, throwing bottles and screaming at air, terrifying the servants and thrashing those who are brave or foolhardy enough to be in halls during his rampage. She has seen him in his infinitely more dangerous sober fury, the cold-eyed monster that he can become, the beast that beat his wife half to death, that put enough fear in the brave woman who had been Mircalla’s mother to scare her into running away the next day.

Never has she seen him like this.

She keeps talking, babbling, hoping against hope that _something_ she says will calm him down, that eventually, she will say the right thing and the demon she can see behind his eyes will disappear. It does not. The anger grows and feeds the demon until the only thing she can see in his face is the murderous, haunting fire of his rage. 

Mircalla flees from the room when her father stands, and she thanks every god she can think of, pagan and otherwise, that he does not follow her.

She never sees Sanna again. A week later, a priest arrives at their small castle and Mircalla narrowly avoids being subjected to an exorcism.

Mircalla stops looking at girls after that.

XxX

Mircalla becomes a master of suppressing her emotions. Girls are still tempting, _so_ tempting, but every time she looks at one, she can hear the voice of the priest in her head, screaming, calling her filthy and a sinner and a demon. And she listens. She doesn’t look, she doesn’t touch; she remains perfectly in control (of her lust; the same cannot be said for her bloodlust) for nearly a hundred years after her death.

It’s 1872, and she meets a girl named Ell. Ell is everything Millarca (for that is Mircalla’s name now; Maman has insisted on a change for every new victim) has been fighting to resist, everything that she has sworn to herself she would never be drawn in by again. But God help her, she cannot resist Ell.

Ell kisses her first. For all her bravery, all her strength, Millarca is utterly terrified of what she knows herself to be. But then Ell kisses her, and all her fragile illusions of being who her father and the priest told her to be come crashing down.

If she were not so brilliantly skilled at hiding her feelings, she thinks she would cry.

They make plans to run away together. They meet at night, mostly, in Ell’s chambers in the human girl’s father’s castle, where Maman can’t see them and it feels like maybe God can’t either.

But then their world shatters around them, and Ell calls her a monster with her dying breath, and Millarca knows that everything has changed. She has lost her love, but she has found herself.

She remembers at the priest calling her a homosexual, screaming, his spit flying into her face, and she thinks that he wasn’t as wrong as she would like to think.

XxX

Her name is Mircalla again (there are only so many reasonable anagrams of it, after all) the first time she hears the word _lesbian_. It’s 1956, and she’s in America, alone. She’s living in Greenwich Village in New York, and she is hopelessly overwhelmed. When she was buried in 1872, homosexuality was a sin, spoken of in whispers, and people like her were worse than murderers.

Now there are clubs for them.

It takes Mircalla nearly three months in the Village to work up the nerve to go to one. She’s renting a tiny apartment, making money selling poetry to the _Village Voice_. She’s kicking the last of a German accent, so faint at this point that it’s impossible to tell what it once sounded like (which is good, as Germans aren’t too popular in post-WWII America). She has no friends. The only person who knows her name is her landlady, a sweet old Swiss woman who speaks maybe three words of English and is delighted to finally have a tenant who she can communicate with.

Still, she puts on her skimpiest clothes one Saturday night and goes to a bar she’s heard serves homosexuals. She’s nervous, a bit, knowing that she has no ID and passes for twenty, at the oldest, but the drinking age is eighteen and she’s hoping they won’t ask.

She isn’t asked for ID at the door, which she finds a bit strange, but she quickly learns that the bar is run by the Mafia, and as long as she’s paying, they don’t care how old she is.

The inside of the club is overwhelming. Mircalla can’t move her eyes fast enough to take in all the flashing lights and the moving bodies on the dance floor. The music is playing from a jukebox in the corner, and two boys are kissing next to it, and for the first time in her seemingly endless life, Mircalla realizes that maybe there is not as much wrong with her as there is with the rest of the world.

Then the music is shut off, the lights come up, and a bell begins to ring as people run for the back door. Mircalla looks around, confused, but not for long, as less than a minute later, the police break down the front door. She escapes with a bit of vampire speed, but half a dozen people are arrested and the bar is trashed.

There is still a long way to go.

XxX

Carmilla (as she is called now) is back in Styria in 1969. She won’t be able to return to Greenwich Village again until the 2000s, at least, to avoid being recognized and questioned about why she has not aged, but she hears about the riots barely a week after they happen. She reads about how protestors ran circles around the police, screaming about gay power and liberation, and in a moment of weakness, she allows herself to hope.

In the nearly three centuries she has been alive, Carmilla has never once heard of homosexuals being _proud_. She has been called a sinner and a demon and a dyke and a monster, and she has learned to not respond. She has learned to take it lying down, to half-believe it herself. And now a ragtag bunch of homeless teenagers has changed the world, changed _her_ world.

But not enough.

Carmilla doesn’t hear the voice of the priest in her head anymore; it’s been far too long for that. But she still hears the wailing of police sirens, the shouting of the patrons at the bar in New York. The image of the two boys, kissing so happily by the jukebox, springing apart and running for the exit is etched into her retinas. The world may be changing, but it is changing without her.

XxX

Carmilla is in Paris in 1997. She meets a girl named Emerald in a bar, and she is quietly in awe of the Parisian native. She is so _unashamed_. She is sharp-tongued and beautiful, and the first time Carmilla sees her, she’s shoving a rather pushy man off of her and loudly announcing that she is _not_ into men. Carmilla is almost awestruck by the sight; a girl who can’t be more than twenty, so full of pride in herself and fire at the way the world tells her she is wrong.

There is something between them. Carmilla isn’t sure she can put a label to it, and Emerald doesn’t bother trying, but there is something in the way their gazes linger on each other and their touches seem to burn. Carmilla does not act on it, and Emerald doesn’t seem to care either way, but it is there and they both know it.

Paris hosts Europride in June. Emerald insists they go. Carmilla? She’s just terrified.

Europride is a whirlwind of chanting, dancing, and more open gayness than Carmilla has seen in the past three centuries. Men dance together in the streets; women kiss on the sidewalks; hundreds of thousands of people chant slogans, in French and English, screaming for liberation and acceptance and simple because they can. Through it all, Emerald pulls Carmilla by the hand, fingers laced together, smiling and laughing and accepting the proffered rainbow face paint, and for a moment, Carmilla thinks _maybe_. Maybe she and Emerald can do what she and Ell could not. It’s so much easier to disappear now. They could walk down one of the side streets of Paris and never come back. She could never go back to Styria or Silas; she could just leave; she could escape her mother.

But Carmilla does not age. She does not age; she does not grow; she does not change. And she always returns to her mother. So she lets Emerald pull her through the streets; she allows her face to be painted as well, in even more garish shades than Emerald’s; she smiles and laughs as she hasn’t since Ell died as she joins in the revelry, the celebration of her and her people.

Then she kisses Emerald on both cheeks and tells her she’ll see her tomorrow, and walks off into the dark streets of Paris, undeniably both proud of who she is and wholly and completely ashamed of what she is doing.

She leaves France that night. She returns to Silas. She returns to her mother, who ignores the faint stains of face paint on her cheeks and tells her that they have much time to make up for.

**Author's Note:**

> I was so, so tempted to put Laura in at the end. But this is Carmilla's story, and since she's pretty clearly confident in her sexuality by the start of the series, I kept it to pre-series. Also, I wanted to focus less on the romance and more on Carmilla just learning to accept herself. Hope you enjoyed, leave a comment if you did. Constructive criticism appreciated!


End file.
